A Comprehensive Guide-Book to Natural, Hygienic and Humane DietBeard, Sidney Hartnoll
Science
A Comprehensive Guide-Book to Natural, Hygienic and Humane Diet
Beard, Sidney Hartnoll
Cooking; Diet; Vegetarian cooking; Vegetarianism
It is not sufficient merely to pray for "our daily bread," and then to
leave its provision entirely to Providence. We need also to _think_
and to take some personal trouble about it--remembering that Heaven
helps those who help themselves. Yet this is what very few people do.
One may safely affirm that four persons out of every five are content
to use defective and innutritious bread every day of their lives. Yet
this should be made a real staff of life.
The whole grain of wheat, if of good quality, contains nearly all that
is needful for the perfect nutrition of the body. With the addition of
a small amount of fat (easily found in nut or dairy butter, cheese or
oil), and of grape sugar and purifying acids (obtainable in fruits),
pure wheatmeal, if properly ground in stone mills, and well made into
delicious home-baked bread, enables one to be almost independent of
other foods, and therefore almost ensures one against a breakdown in
health if there is difficulty in obtaining a varied and well
proportioned dietary from other sources.
Instead of securing and using bread such as this, the majority of the
community complacently eat white bread--emasculated, robbed of its
gluten (which is equivalent to albumen) and of the phosphates and
mineral salts that are stored in the inner part of the husk of the
grain. It is composed almost entirely of starch, with the addition of
such adulterants as the baker or miller feels inclined to introduce
for commercial reasons, and is not conducive to the proper operation
of the digestive and eliminative organs.
It is difficult for bakers or the public to buy really good wholemeal.
The meal that is on the markets often consists of cheap roller-milled
flour with some sweepings of bran or seconds thrown in. And even if
the entire grain is supplied, the outer cuticle of the wheat, when
_rolled_ (in the modern steel-roller mills that for reasons of economy
have superseded the good old-fashioned stone _grinding_ mills),
instead of being so reduced as to be capable of complete digestion, is
left with rough edges called _spiculae_, which irritate the digestive
tract, cause relaxation, and arouse prejudice against the 'brown'
loaf. Such wholemeal cannot be perfectly assimilated because the bran
is not properly broken up, and, in addition to this fact, the
cerealine, which acts like diastase in the conversion of starch into
sugar, is not liberated and rendered available as an aid to
digestion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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